The organizational capacity to cope with unexpected changes remains a fundamental challenge in strategy as global competition and technological innovation increase environmental uncertainty. Conventional strategy-making is often conceived as a sequential linear process where we see it as a non-linear interaction between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms dealing with multiple actions taken throughout the organization over time. It is driven by intension but with a flexible balance between centralized (planned) and decentralized (spontaneous) activities. We adopt the principles of complementary Yin-Yang elements and Zhong Yong balance to explain the time bound interaction between these opposing yet complementary strategy-making mechanisms where tradeoffs and synergies are balanced across hierarchical levels.

Analyzing the internationalization of large companies from small countries requires understanding the process of internationalization by examining the interface between micro (firm strategies) and macro (the forces of centripetal and centrifugal) level factors. We examine the growth and international expansion of the ten largest companies in Denmark, Finland, and Norway over the period 1990 to 1999. Most companies in the sample became more international during the last decade across basically all the investigated dimensions of internationalization. This was particularly accentuated in the case of Norwegian firms, possibly due to their lower degree of internationalization at the beginning of the period. The study also shows that companies mainly have internationalized their operations activities, while such strategic activities as research and development activities and headquarters functions to a much larger extent are kept in the home country.

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The recent Bo Xilai affair has created strains in the Chinese political system
and has intensified the power struggle concerning the new leadership
appointments due to take place at the 18th Party Congress. The pressure on
the political system is intensified by a number of social phenomena such as
increased fragmentation, vested interests, corruption, social unrest, increased
income and social inequalities and a de facto reform stop since 2009. Some
scholars believe that we now see the end of ‘resilient authoritarianism’ and
that China either will experience a political and social collapse or move
towards a democratic system. However, developments since 1989 show the
regime’s amazing ability to revitalize its organizational capabilities and regain
its Mandate of Heaven. It may be too early to declare the Party over.

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This paper is intended to propose a relationship-based theory of the firm (R’BT), an
alternative to the transaction cost theory. The R’BT takes relationship disharmony
(rather than transaction costs) as its basic unit of analysis of the nature of the firm, and
argues relationship disharmony derives from conflict of interests, a problem faced by
any human organizations; to reduce the conflict of interests, the best way is to
harmonize relationships by mutually accommodating or internalizing the other party’s
interests into its own consideration; the degree of harmony or disharmony in the
relationships will in turn determine the performance of the organization in question.
This paper provides a completely different explanation from the transaction cost
economics when addressing issues such like the existence, boundary and internal
organization of the firm. Also discussed are its implications for organizational
management and economy.

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Intercultural management broadly refers to the handling of cultural differences in businesses
and organizations. Although culture develops in all social groups, such as in firms, schools
and neighbourhoods, intercultural management often refers to cultures framed within national
and ethnic settings. Language, religion, family relations, work ethics and daily living are
some aspects of culture. These cultural manifestations reflect the community’s world views,
norms and values, and shape social behaviours and practices of members in the community.
The idea of “intercultural management” also suggests that cultural differences are sources of
miscommunication and misunderstandings. So in international business, intercultural
management is a daily activity that affects different operations, including localization of
services in a foreign market, offering local hospitality to foreign tourists, adapting one’s
negotiation style to overseas business partners, communication in an international work
environment and devising appropriate human resource services in overseas subsidiaries.

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This paper presents a critique of Freek Vermeulen’s synthesis of rigor and relevance in
management research, and argues (1) at the first glance, Vermeulen’s papers are very
appealing; (2) but with a closer scrutiny, we can unveil the weak and shaky
foundations of his argument; (3) as a consequence, his solution of ‘adding a second
loop’ to make management research meet dual needs of rigor and relevance is illusory
and merely an applied science fiction; (4) and finally, there are two real contributions
of his papers to the irrelevance debate, but they are not like what we might have
thought.

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This thesis consists of five empirical studies, all relating to shareholder activism at annual
general meetings.
The first study concerns the structure and content of general meetings in Denmark and Sweden
comparatively. The paper reveals significant differences in the level of activism, with Swedish
investors being the most active in terms of proposals, proxy voting, and ‘voice’. The paper takes
a legal approach, and discusses divergence in activism levels from the perspective of shareholder
prerequisites to engage in monitoring efforts. Further, the paper investigating the topics
addressed through questions and opinions. The results show that matters which can be
categorized as irrelevant are reasonably rare. This is an important finding, as suggestions to
abolish general meetings have often been based on the assumption that general meetings
facilitate nothing but irrelevant, time consuming, and costly discussions that serves no
monitoring function.
The second study analyses the impact of voting power on shareholder activism. We hypothesize
that there is a positive relationship between shareholder activism and a measure of the largest
shareholder’s sensitivity to increased participation by small shareholders and find that firms’
amenability to small shareholder influence leads to more proposals by the nomination
committee, but fewer proposals by other shareholders. We interpret this as evidence that the
shareholder elected nomination committees effectively channel shareholder concerns and
preempt other kinds of activism. Politicians and companies that desire active shareholders could
improve the amenability of firms to shareholder influence by ownership transparency,
shareholder committees, and contacts with shareholder associations and other vehicles for
collective action...

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Qualitative information and data show significant differences in the magnitude and type of foreign
direct investment inflows among developing economies. Explanation of the differences requires
analysis of market institutional factors as well as the supply and demand side conditions. This paper
adopts the approach that different configurations of supply, demand and market institutional factors
explain the type of investment flows into developing economies. The argument is illustrated through
a comparative study of China and India.
Key Words: Developing Economies; Foreign Direct Investment; China, and India
JEL Classification: F23, P52

The paper investigates the consequences of interactions between autonomy, intra and inter-organizational networks for the performance of subsidiaries. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the impact of changes in autonomy and network relationships rather than investigating levels. This introduces the concept of adjustment of subsidiary strategies to changes in the international and host country business environment. Based on a survey of 350 foreign owned subsidiaries located in the UK, Germany and Denmark, we find evidence that increases in the inter-organizational network relationships of subsidiaries lead to increased subsidiary performance. Further, increased subsidiary autonomy positively affects subsidiary inter-organizational network relationships, and to some degree negatively affects intra-organizational network relationships. Finally, overlapping effects between inter- and intra-organizational network relationships are found.

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The global economy is perpetually changing to a highly knowledge-based
economy in which services and especially knowledge-intensive services are
increasingly offshored (geographically relocated) to emerging market economies
such as India. This trend is interesting as for decades services had been
characterized as intangible, perishable, heterogeneous and inseparable from their
sources of origin making a geographic dispersion of service production and
consumption unimaginable. Thus, the geographic relocation of the services is
expected to infer organizational and operational reconfigurations also impacting
the service production. The thesis studies these reconfigurations by questioning:
how does offshoring impact on the production of services.
In order to capture the unique characteristics of services and provide a thorough
understanding of the phenomenon, detailed and dynamic analyses of activities and
actors through process perspectives are argued to be necessary. Process
perspectives allow studying relationships between actions and individual actors
from an organizational and operational angle. Two process perspectives are
applied in this thesis in three independent research papers. The first research paper
studies the offshoring process as a strategic and organizational change process that
leads to a misalignment of components of a services production system and
questions how this impact elicits a reconfiguration of the system.
The second and third paper investigates the offshored production process of
knowledge-intensive services with a focus on actors in the processes and their
activities. That is, the second paper questions how the increase of cognitive
distance between actors inferred by offshoring changes the production of the
services including costs and value outcomes. The third paper questions how
offshoring impacts client co-production, i.e. the transfer and co-creation of
knowledge, in a similarly designed service production process of knowledgeintensive
business services. Collectively, this research shows that process
perspectives on service offshoring are essential to study the impact of offshoring
on service production. It also allows an understanding on the importance of actors
and the causal links between them and activities.